Forum on « desecuritisation and emancipation »

Securitization theory and securitization studies

Abstract

Opposed to the recently fashionable ’moral and ethical’ criticism levelled against Ole Waever’s securitization theory this article argues that such criticism fundamentally misconceives the analytical goal of securitization theory, which is namely to offer a tool for practical security analysis. In arguing that being political (critical) on the part of the analyst has no bearing on the type of practical security analysis that can be done using securitization theory, this article proposes that the analytical goal of such criticism and that of securitization theory are incommensurable; in the process rendering obsolete this kind of criticism of securitization theory. By way of reconciling securitization theory with its critics, however, this article takes up Waever’s suggestion of wider securitization studies in which moral and ethical criticism, as well as being political, can play a supplementary role in the analysis of securitization theory.

No way out: desecuritization, emancipation and the eternal return of the political ¾ a reply to Aradau

Abstract

Claudia Aradau addresses important issues within the securitization approach of the Copenhagen School. Discussions of security, securitization and desecuritization always involve implicit or explicit stances on political preferences. Unsatisfied with both desecuritization and the identification of security with emancipation, she goes on to develop an alternative take on the problem. De-coupling emancipation from security, Aradau tries to locate emancipation as the counter-strategy to securitization in a realm beyond and outside the reach of exceptional politics, sovereign authority and exclusionary moves. What Aradau underestimates is the central, indeed constitutive, role that security plays in the ontotheology of politics.

On securitization politics as contexted texts and talk

Abstract

As a reaction to Claudia Aradau’s essay in this journal, I firstly feel something more should be said about the strengths of the Copenhagen School’s modest, but analytically, normatively and empirically useful approach to securitization, and securitization’s relationship with desecuritization. When properly understood, this analytical approach helps us in the same limited way to answer Aradau’s call for prior political theorizing. Secondly, I want emphatically to demur from Aradau’s assertion of the necessary priority of political analyses of securitization before beginning its conceptual or comparative analysis. Sceptically, I am led to ask: ’Can only a master political theorist emancipate the securitization analyst?’ Finally, I want to express my appreciation of Aradau’s creative and insightful approach to the dilemmas of immigration-relevant securitization in the European context.

Limits of security, limits of politics? A response

Abstract

My article, ’Security and the Other Scene: Desecuritization And Emancipation’ has triggered reactions to the political claims it put forth. The most controversial claim ¾ in the eyes of the critics ¾ was the formulation of the impossibility to think security only analytically, outside any political project. The other main criticism concerned the concept of politics formulated in the article. In my response, I argue first that political decisions are necessary to cut across the ’indiscernability of knowledge’. Moreover, security is the political concept par excellence, as it entails questions about the politics that we enact. Second, I expose the closure that Schmitt’s concept of the political entails for our possibilities of thinking a different politics.

Journal of International Relations and Development March 2006, Volume 9, Number 1

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